> ideally people can always just think in concepts

Are you pursing an idea of how to help people like this author* access this mode that some of us are always in unless kicked out of it by the need for words?

Very needed right now — the opposite of the YouTube-ization of idea transfer.

It doesn't seem clear this is accessible without other changes in wiring? The inability to "picture" things as visuals seems to swap out for "conceptualizing" things in -- well, I don't have words for this.

An attempt from that essay:

This is not what Hadamard is talking about when he describes the wordless thought of the mathematicians and researchers he has surveyed. Instead, what they seem to be doing is something similar to this subconscious, parallelized search, except they do it in a “tensely” focused way.

The impression I get is that Hadamard loads a question into his mind (either in a non-verbal way, or by reading a mathematical problem that has been written by himself or someone else), and then he holds the problem effortfully centered in his mind. Effortfully, but wordlessly, and without clear visualizations. Describing the mental image that filled his mind while working on a problem concerning infinite series for his thesis, Hadamard writes that his mind was occupied by an image of a ribbon which was thicker in certain places (corresponding to possibly important terms). He also saw something that looked like equations, but as if seen from a distance, without glasses on: he was unable to make out what they said.

I’m not sure what is going on here.

* https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/wordless-thought

A couple of this author's speculations aren't how I'd say it works when this is one's default mode, but most are in the neighborhood. He comes the closest of what I've read by people who do think the way the author thinks — which seems to be most people.